Successful Right-time Marketing Requires the Right Kind of Data

By now, most smart marketers understand that in order to deliver best-in-class customer experience (CX), they need to make good on the promise of digital messaging that’s personalized to cater to consumers’ particular wants and needs. To accomplish this, advertisers need to fully integrate the “right data” into their “right customer, right message, right place, right time ” marketing strategies.

Going beyond the “4 Rights” requires better data capture, integration, and management practices. As we’ve discussed before (e.g., here and here), some of the biggest challenges that brands face in our ultra-competitive marketplace have to do with data. We collect many terabytes of user information every day, and yet, without some means of prioritizing and synthesizing those many data points, there’s little chance to fully realize the goal of true 1:1 personalization.

Provided during user registration and collected as users interact with your site or app

Data Sources

Collected by multiple, often unknown, data providers

Completely transparent and permission-based; users opt-in by registering for your site or app, or in the process of completing a transaction (e.g., making a purchase or filling in a request form onsite)

Collection Technique

Users are often unknowingly “cookied” by certain sites and apps and tracked across the Internet

All user activity is attributed to a single identity, even across channels; records are updated with users’ real-time social data and on-site activity

Accuracy

Data is often stale and inaccurate due to multiple consumers using the same device and the inability to track user activity across channels

Your brand owns all data and is solely responsible for security, privacy and legal compliance

Privacy/ Security

Your brand maintains no control over how user data is being managed or used

And while we’re big advocates for synthesizing all available consumer data into a 360-degree view of target audience members, it’s important to recognize that not all data is created equally. Specifically, information that’s been sourced by third parties can be racked with challenges:

At best: Third-party data is often collected invasively, by cookie tracking or other more sinister methods.

Worse: Third-party data is often inaccurate; brokered lists don’t evolve over time, and when you rent lists, you’re only gaining a one-time snapshot of the users in question.

The most valuable and actionable data comes directly from your users, including the personal details they log in your preference centres, in online request forms and checkout transactions, through social authentication, and via other consumer self-identification/engagement channels. And the best way to capture and manage that data is via a platform that’s capable of synthesizing the information into actionable insights based on the triggers and touchpoints that drive your user activity.

Sophisticated platforms like that of Gigya, one of our Marketing Solutions partners, can automatically reconcile both schema-based details (like name and email) and unstructured information (like social connections, interests, and online activity) in real time. This way, you can be confident that you’ve got that the right data working for you, no matter the strategy or business goal you’re trying to move up the field.